Mondo’s Cult Posters Hit Big Time in Oscars Archive

Chris Ware's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives poster for Mondo.

Alan Hynes' Vigilante poster for Mondo.

Phantom City Creative's Werewolves on Wheel poster for Mondo.

Methane Studios' Westworld poster for Mondo.

Tom Whalen's Who Framed Roger Rabbit poster for Mondo.

Mike Sutfin's Blade II poster for Mondo.

Jason Munn's Bonnie and Clyde poster for Mondo.

Todd Slater's Close Encounters of the Third Kind poster for Mondo.

Martin Ansin's Cronos poster for Mondo.

Aaron Horkey and Vania Zouravliov's Dracula poster for Mondo.

Ken Taylor's Hellboy II: The Golden Army poster for Mondo.

Tyler Stout's Inglourious Basterds poster for Mondo.

Tyler Stout's Kill Bill poster for Mondo.

Rich Kelly's Metropolis poster for Mondo.

Olly Moss' Moon poster for Mondo.

Olly Moss' RoboCop poster for Mondo.

Martin Ansin's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World poster for Mondo.

Olly Moss' The Evil Dead poster for Mondo.

Tyler Stout's The Empire Strikes Back poster for Mondo.

Ken Taylor's Star Trek: First Contact poster for Mondo.

Martin Ansin's Bride of Frankenstein poster for Mondo.

Tom Whalen's Steamboat Willie poster for Mondo.

Feverish sci-fi buffs aren’t the only ones itching to get their hands on Mondo’s cool, collectible film posters. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will begin archiving one original silk-screen copy of each limited-edition print produced by Alamo Drafthouse’s cinematic art boutique, the Oscars organization said Monday.

“We are always seeking out the unusual, and the Mondo collection certainly fits the bill,” Anne Coco, the Academy’s graphic arts librarian, said in a press release.

Alamo CEO Tim League says the call from the filmmaking institution came “totally out of the blue.”

“I didn’t know we had friends within the Academy,” he told Wired.com by phone.

Mondo’s limited-run posters, created by hot artists like Olly Moss, Tyler Stout and Shepard Fairey, generally focus on sci-fi, horror and cult films both old and new. A recent Director’s Series honored such geek favorites as Guillermo Del Toro and Duncan Jones. Thanks in large part to the Austin, Texas-based indie cinema chain’s taste-maker touch, Mondo’s highly prized art pieces often sell out within minutes of the sales being posted to Twitter.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which stages the Oscars awards each year, routinely includes each studio-produced one-sheet poster as part of its library, but League said Mondo’s popular posters are the first non-Hollywood art to be included.

“They’ve been keeping tabs on what we’ve been doing with our licensed studio posters over the last couple of years and decided that our posters were worthy of being archived right alongside the official movie posters,” League said. “It’s a huge honor to be the first ones outside the studio system to be selected by the Academy.”

Among the first Mondo posters to be collected by the Academy will be a new limited-edition print by veteran artist Drew Struzan inspired by 1931’s Frankenstein film. See it, and other examples of Mondo’s heavily sci-fi- and horror-influenced back catalog, in the gallery above. The entire back catalog can be seen at MondoArchive.com.

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